Patrick Lencioni, author of the book and founder of The Table Group, created a leadership fable that demonstrates the top five ways a team can fall apart and how to prevent it from happening ahead of time. This was the topic of discussion for last unit in Elements of Team Leadership.
While all of them are detrimental to team cohesion, the dysfunction "Absences of Trust" is the one that has the greatest negative impact. As you can see in the pyramid above, trust is the most basic building block of team relations. If that is missing, it will affect other aspects of the team and will eventually lead to a dysfunctional one.
One team that I was on had one member that did not want to have any personal connection with the rest of the team. He didn't tell us about his personal life, about his hobbies or his family. In fact, he openly stated that the only reason he was on the team was to accomplish the goals of the team, not to make friends with anyone else. While the rest of the members of the team got along really well together, functioned well in group settings, and accomplished many goals, this person eventually became excluded, mostly because he didn't want to trust us with details about his life. Now that the team has dispersed, that person decided that he wanted to build relationships with us, but now no one trusts him.
As I read through this book, I realized that the dysfunctions do not limit themselves to just a work situation. Lack of trust in any relationship, friends or family included, will ruin any type of personal connection or ability to work efficiently together. Not only do I hope to apply the counteractions to prevent these dysfunctions from happening, but now I feel like in the future I will be able to be a better leader because I can foresee future problems within a team situation in class project groups, campus clubs, or even in the work setting.
